Two years ago, a group of companies from seemingly disparate industries met in San Francisco to discuss the possibility of creating an open standard for process automation. With 30 different companies in attendance at that first meeting, the group quickly recognized the commonalities among them and the need for more flexible manufacturing solutions. Soon after, they launched the Open Process Automation™ Forum (OPAF) under the auspices of The Open Group® to begin work toward developing a standard that would address the common pain points manufacturers in process automation face today.

Virtual machines (VM) and containers are similar in concept, but very different in their implementation and use. Conceptually, both allow the running of multiple services on a single platform. Both are quicker and less expensive to deploy than physical…

How much knowledge is required, in order to make a proper ethical judgement?Assuming that consequences matter, it would obviously be useful to be able to reason about the consequences. This is typically a combination of inductive reasoning (what has ha…

Professor Luciano @Floridi has recently introduced the concept of Soft Ethics. He wants to make a distinction between ethical judgements that go into laws, regulations and other norms, which he calls Hard Ethics, and ethical judgements that apply and e…

Containers are becoming mainstream as companies aim to cut costs and increase performance. And, with increased use of PaaS (Platform as a Service) offered by vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google, organizations take advantage of built-in support…

I recently wrote a blog entitled ‘Why the Court of Master Sommeliers Made the Right Decision’ in which I stressed the importance of program integrity in the world of certification. A number of people have asked me subsequently about how The Open Group goes about building our certification programs, and how we achieve and maintain that integrity. Well the short answer is practice and experience!

@shoshanazuboff’s latest book was published at the end of January. 700 pages of detailed research and analysis, and I’ve been trying to read as much as possible before everyone else. Meanwhile I have seen display copies everywhere – not just at the ICA…

(Running a bit late with this one – apologies…) For general reference, here’s the schedule for videos in my weekly ‘Tetradian on Architecture‘ series on YouTube, for 2019 first-quarter: Episode 49: ‘The usefulness of capability-maps‘ (published 03 January 2019) Episode…